Her Quicksilver Lover: Even Gods Fall in Love, Book 6 (2 page)

But for what? Why set this up if he had enough money to last him forever? Either he had no money and the rumours about his wealth were not true, or he was doing this for another reason. One nobody she knew was privy to. Perhaps nobody was. Or was he setting up something else?

After helping herself to another dish of tea, she carefully placed the empty dish in its saucer and settled down to do as she was told and nap. But not before she had taken a look around.

Getting to her feet cautiously, Joanna found she could walk, or rather, hobble. The twist had been worse than she’d thought, but it was still a twist, and it would wear off soon. Clutching the furniture, she made her way around the room. If anyone interrupted her, she’d say she was testing her foot.

First, she went to the portrait.

A small plaque screwed to the frame told her the identity of the sitter.
Adora, Comtesse d’Argento, 1675,
it read, with the name of an artist she did not recognize. If the portraitist had been true to his subject, he had depicted a lovely woman. Her pearly skin begged to be touched; her eyes dared the observer to do so. Unlike those of her descendant, they were dark, as was her hair. He’d said it was a good resemblance. How did he know that? But at least he had come from somewhere.

Joanna limped around the room. A bureau was set to one side of the window, but when she guiltily slid open the top, it contained nothing but a set of quills, a crystal inkwell and one of fine sand, some embossed calling cards, and engraved writing paper. She picked up a signet ring, but although it was a fine, carved sapphire, it was the coat of arms she’d seen on the side of his carriage, not a secret sigil or something. The drawer was locked, but she had no picks with her and she was not clever enough to use a hairpin. Perhaps she should learn, but she had been loath to do so, hating this part of the work. Prying and poking around had never appealed.

The lovely couches were new, the side tables elegant, the rugs unmarked. This was a room where the master received visitors. He wouldn’t keep his personal secrets here.

Gaining very little except more pain from her perambulations, Joanna gave up and sat on the sofa once more. Gathering her skirts decorously, she lay down and prepared to rest, although she did not expect to actually sleep, exhausted though she was.

This room was pleasant, and relatively quiet considering it overlooked the busy thoroughfare of St. James’s street. It smelled good too, faintly of lavender polish with a tang of the citrus cologne the comte habitually wore. Breathing deeply, she closed her eyes.

* * * * *

Joanna blinked. Goodness, she had fallen asleep after all. The strain of the day and arriving for work at five had obviously exhausted her. Not that she had done that much today. The sofa she had chosen was side-on to the fire, tilted more towards the window.

When she turned her head to consult the clock on the mantelpiece, she paused when a movement snagged her attention. She wasn’t alone. A man sat on a stool by the fire. He hadn’t noticed her movement, so she half-closed her eyes and observed him.

Mr. Lightfoot had employed her. Tall and lean, with a deeply creased face and sharp, perceptive eyes, Mr. Lightfoot was his lordship’s right-hand man. He managed the club and attended his master as a valet when his duties allowed, working harder than anyone else here. He had high standards too. Left to his own devices he would probably have dismissed her for her transgression this morning, but his master had intervened. Now he waited here, probably ensuring she did not do anything she should not, like pocket one of the small treasures. It wasn’t small treasures she wanted. It was secrets.

The man was sitting by the unlit fire, contemplating his toes. Or rather, his
hooves
.

Joanna froze, staring at his feet. Lightfoot had removed his shoes and stockings, stretching his legs out before him, his concentration completely on his feet.
His hooves
. Perhaps if she repeated it to herself long enough, she’d understand what she was seeing. Or was she dreaming? Joanna fought to control her breathing as her heart pulsed harder and faster.

That must be it. She remained perfectly still, her attention riveted on those—hooves.

From the knees down, his legs were hairy. No, that was wrong. They were
furry
. She couldn’t see his skin for the thick pelt that covered it. And his feet terminated in those horny protuberances that had no business being there.

Of course she’d read of freaks of nature, creatures born with two heads or extra legs, but the aberrations never lived long. They were just accidents. This, though—what was this? How could it happen? He walked like every other person, and he never showed signs of discomfort or difficulty. He was shaped like a man, and as far as she knew he didn’t have a tail, or horns, or anything else she’d associate with what looked more like the legs of a goat than the legs of a man.

Sighing, Lightfoot picked up his stockings, which lay in an untidy bundle by his side, and rolled them back on, securing them at his knee by tucking them under his breeches and tightening the buckles. His feet still appeared odd, even covered, but when he put his shoes on, she could discern no difference. He was very good at hiding his deformity.

As he turned to glance at her, Joanna quickly closed her eyes and fought to keep still. Her heart pounded far too hard, but the shock she’d received had increased the beat and left her mind blank.

Lightfoot got to his feet and left the room, his step as steady as always.

Feet that deformed must cause him pain. Her heart went out to him when she realised what agony he must be in every day. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, tracing the elaborate patterns etched into the plaster.

Joanna was as sure as she could be that she had really seen a man with a pair of hooves. Once she told her father he would not allow her to leave until she had discovered more. But she could not keep such an explosive fact from him.

Was Lord d’Argento a benefactor to unfortunates, or did he share their misfortunes?

Joanna tried, but she could not imagine the elegant comte with legs that hairy and misshapen or with hooves. She had truly seen them, could describe their horny reality, the way the tan colour darkened to near black at the ends, the tufts of wiry hair that stuck out from the clefts. In her years spent on the streets of London she had seen some terrible deformities, some self-inflicted in order to garner sympathy and pennies, but she had never seen anything like this.

She forced herself to breathe slowly and steadily until her heart regained its regular rhythm. Her instinct was to leap up from the sofa and run, forcing her injured ankle to work, ignoring the pain until she got far, far away.

She had a story.
A real story. A philanthropic comte? Or a secret sufferer from a debilitating disease who gathered like-minded people around him? Either story would work. In the past people would have labelled Lightfoot a witch and drowned or burned him, but they didn’t do things like that in the enlightened eighteenth century. They might hang ten-year-old children for stealing a penny loaf, but they would baulk at drowning a man for having hairy legs and hooves. They might take him for further study, or exhibit him at a country fair. Some might call that a fate worse than death.

If she did not return, she would learn nothing. Everyone knew the best way to discover something was from the inside. Otherwise the effort could be like laying siege to a fortress, and she didn’t have time for that.

Gathering her thoughts around her, as she might a thick cloak, she lay back on the sofa and waited for someone to return. She didn’t sleep. She might never close her eyes again, for fear of seeing what she should not.

Of course, when Lightfoot re-entered the room, she opened her eyes, jolted back to consciousness. Gasping, she clenched her fists and shot upright, jarring her foot. The pain helped her to regain her senses.

Lightfoot stayed at the other side of the room, as if he sensed her apprehension. “I’ve ordered a sedan for you. Paid for, of course. Go home, rest and take tomorrow off. Master’s orders.” His lips tightened, as if the generosity wasn’t his choice. “We’ll see you as usual the day after that.”

She shifted, but he held up a hand. “I’ll send a maid to help you.”

“Thank you.” She didn’t have much dignity left, but she mustered what she had and lifted her chin like a princess.

He raised a brow and left the room. Only then did she realise she was shaking.

Chapter Three

Lightfoot entered Amidei’s room without ceremony, as he usually did. The brief knock on the door was merely a nod to courtesy. “I put her in a sedan, my lord. She seemed a bit shaken.” His grin was positively wicked.

Aware that he’d behaved like a coward, scuttling away without seeking a conclusion to the matter, Amidei turned in his chair and waved at his valet, the one he used when Lightfoot was busy. “Leave us. I’ll wear the grey tonight, the new pale grey velvet. See to it, if you would.”

The valet, another immortal, but a minor one and not someone Amidei would trust with all his secrets—not yet, at any rate—hurried away into the dressing room and closed the door. A damned good valet, though. Amidei only employed the best.

Amidei nodded to the side table by the window. “Help yourself, if you wish.”

Lightfoot crossed to the tantalus and unerringly unfastened it. There wasn’t a lock in the house Lightfoot couldn’t overcome, and he barely noticed this one that nominally at least blocked his access to the three decanters. He chose the brandy and glanced at Amidei, who nodded.

Lightfoot’s deft handling of the crystal decanter and glasses seemed completely at odds to his lanky form and long, spidery fingers, but the man had helped Amidei in some delicate tasks and proved more than adequate to the task. Frequently it fell to Amidei to bind wounds or cure ills, and sometimes the cures could be appallingly bloody. Lightfoot was one of the few people he could trust to help him.

Amidei’s other, more powerful name was Mercury.

In that capacity, he acted as physician to the gods. They could hardly ask mortals to help them, since their blood, or ichor, was poisonous to mortal touch, but they had enough medical knowledge to handle most situations, and they could call Amidei when something appeared particularly difficult.

The factotum brought the generous doses of brandy over and handed one to Amidei, before picking up a chair and planting it on the carpet, facing his master. After a glance at his master for permission, he sat with a relieved sigh.

“Was I right? When I skimmed her mind, when I was carrying her, I suspected something. A tick of awareness, of not being all she should be. Did you read her?”

Lightfoot grunted. “She keeps her thoughts tidily arranged. I read nothing other than her desire to work hard here. I needed to give her a nudge. Shock a mortal, and they will temporarily drop their guard.”

“So what else did you do?” Amidei demanded.

“Took off my shoes and stockings,” Lightfoot said succinctly.

“
What
?” Amidei dropped his head into his hands and swore. Lifting his head, he glared at his factotum. “You couldn’t show her something a little less obvious? Hint at our secrets instead of displaying them blatantly? Dropped a glass to startle her? Dear God, man, how are we to keep ourselves hidden if you do things like that? I would never have allowed her to go home had I known what you’d done.”

Lightfoot shook his head, his lugubrious expression lifting when he smiled. “She has a good head on her shoulders, that one. I wanted her to see something she couldn’t excuse away as coincidence or her imagination to give her that shock I mentioned.” Lifting the glass to his lips, he took a good swallow of the fiery liquid. “I can explain it away later. She was half asleep, and yes, I have hairy legs, but cloven hooves? That part must have been a dream.” He winked. “She may tell people, but they’ll not believe her, or if they do they’ll say I’m possessed of a terrible deformity. I had the front part of my feet chopped off in an accident. I’ve told people that one before and they swallowed it whole.”

“You should not have let her see.” Like all immortals with differing forms, Lightfoot had the ability to appear normal. Generally he preferred not to, and kept his hooves and hairy legs. All immortals had clear blood, but they kept the illusion firmly planted in the deepest part of their brains that it was red, and so it appeared red to others.

Anger simmered through Amidei, and he had to pause to calm himself. He had lived a long time, surely long enough to cure irrational bursts of temper. They had plagued his youth, and he had worked hard to overcome them, but faced with incidents like this, the effort was harder. “I told you to read her. I was asking for a second opinion, not a damned exposure of what and who we are!”

He gulped his drink, using the burn of the brandy to calm his mind and force himself to the truth. Self-deceivers were the worst kind of fools. His interest in the new maid was not entirely for the benefit of his kind. “Tell me how she reacted to seeing your hooves.”

Lightfoot gave a satisfied grin. “Total and utter shock. It gave me time to read her, as much as I could without causing her pain. She was locked up tight. Either someone has done it for her, or she has natural resistance to mind-to-mind communication.” Lightfoot shrugged. “I read enough to be sure of one thing. She is mortal, that’s all. She came for a reason I have yet to discern, but I sensed none of the immortal about her.”

“Neither did I.” Joanna’s mortal vulnerability had affected Amidei far too much for his liking. He had gazed into the soul of this perfectly ordinary human and found more than he wanted to in the depths of those dark eyes. For too long he’d kept himself apart. That one moment of absolute contact had floored him.

Try as he might, he had not been able to get the memories of the little maid out of his mind. Under those dowdy clothes and bottle-bottom spectacles, beauty lurked. His annoyance that he could not control himself so much as to take his eyes off one of his own employees added to his irritation with Lightfoot’s reckless act.

“Your tactics were too drastic,” he said eventually. He put down his empty glass and allowed Lightfoot to refill it, watching the amber liquid rise. “Why did you do it?”

Lightfoot’s hand didn’t tremble as he put the decanter back in the tantalus. “It was highly enjoyable to observe her reactions,” he said slowly, sitting down once more.

“You did it for devilment, then.”

Lightfoot shrugged. “You know what I am. Why should I not play a few pranks?”

Amidei had accepted that part of the satyr’s nature when he’d taken him on. Lightfoot had proved too much for his previous master, even though that had been Eros, currently embodied in the person of the Duke of Kentmere. Lightfoot had become an excellent manager for the club, and in many ways acted as Amidei’s deputy, but his forays into mischief occasionally needed correction. That would not stop him, but it would make him think twice before doing something too drastic.

Amidei drew a sharp breath and tried to forget how she felt in his arms. In her immediate distress she’d curled into him, and roused instincts he’d thought long dead. Protective instincts, to be precise. She was surprisingly small, but that was because of her ill-fitting clothes. That caraco jacket was much too large for her, but she’d stuffed an extra kerchief into the capacious bosom. He’d seen the extra folds peeking out. Her warmth had touched him and when she’d touched his bare skin, brushing her hand over his, he’d had to suppress his reactive flinch.

Nobody had evoked that reaction in him, not for a long, long time. He must not allow his instincts to override his judgment now.

“Was polishing the marble to the consistency of glass amusing too?”

“No. Read me, lord. See if I did it.”

A satyr would be capable of such dangerous jokes. Amidei set his jaw and met his factotum’s eyes, reading him as the man opened his mind fully.

Lightfoot was telling the truth. Used to reading his employee, Amidei detected no false notes. No prank. “We’ll keep her under observation, but at least we know she isn’t an immortal sent to spy by the Titans. Of course, she could be a mortal sent to spy.”

He got to his feet and went to the window, examining the small bureau that stood to one side of it. “The lock is intact.” The drawer was easily forced, and he kept it locked as a test. Nothing significant lay inside. There were no fresh scratches on the brass plate or the polished surround. Relief untensed his stiff shoulders, and he felt easier as he sat down. The truth was, he didn’t want the little maid to be guilty of prying for his enemies. He wanted to like her. Perhaps more.

“We have another matter to deal with. Find out who was too eager with the polishing cloth.”

The factotum nodded.

“Get the landing and the stairs carpeted. Club colours.”

“Immediately. An excellent notion, if I may say so.” Lightfoot didn’t mention the expense, nor would Amidei expect him to. Safety came first.

“She spilled some cream on the way there and slipped on it on her way back.”

The satyr shrugged. “She could have done it deliberately, in order to get in here. She wanted to see this room, there’s no doubt about that.”

“And she’s curious about me. But she could have broken her neck with that stunt. Would she have taken that chance?”

“Some people would.”

Amidei took a cautious sip of his replenished drink. He needed to think. “We’re agreed that she is not an immortal.”

“Unless she’s a very clever immortal,” Lightfoot pointed out.

“No.” Only a fraction of doubt remained about that possibility. Amidei was too wise to assume he knew everything. “Nothing in her mind says ‘immortal’ to me, none of the signs are there. I will pursue other possibilities first.” He would love her not to have any ulterior motive. He wanted—he wasn’t quite sure yet.

He was lying to himself. He knew exactly what he wanted, and it did not involve clothes.

Lightfoot shifted. “Before you allow your basic urges to drive all your decisions, we need to discover who she is and what she wants with you.”

Typical that Lightfoot had noticed Amidei’s burgeoning desire for the woman. “I want to know quickly. I need to know if I have to protect her or—something else.” Oppose her, ensure she didn’t discover what she was looking for. He could think of many reasons she might want information, but he wanted to know for sure. With her mind as protected as it was, he could not discover it that way.

“I could use my attraction to her.” He knew better than to deny his desire, now that Lightfoot had detected it. “Seduce her.”

Lightfoot grinned and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m not sure who would be seducing whom. She likes you, you know.”

And he liked her. If he did not regain his common sense soon, he’d lose all sense of danger. He was a god, after all, able to combat everything thrown at him so far.

“You’re a wicked old satyr,” Amidei growled at him, turning back toward the window.

“I am indeed,” said the man smoothly. “I take it we’re done here?” He heaved himself to his feet. “Why you insist on employing mortals I will never know.”

Amidei sighed and cast a glare over his shoulder at his annoyingly perceptive factotum. “Mortals are sometimes sensitive. Some can detect the presence of others. Besides, it makes for an interesting mix.”

Usually, that was. Amidei preferred to keep his life interesting. He added, “And this time, I will not make an exclusively immortal establishment.” He paused, thinking back thirty years to the blackest, most shocking moment of his long life. “Gather a group of immortals together and they are a natural target. Blend in mortals, and they provide a shield. If we ever have to announce our existence, we want them to join with us, not against us. I will never allow immortals to isolate and destroy us again.”

The party that had started so well had killed his contemporaries. He had been instrumental in arranging the gathering of the immortals. Encouraged by the Duke of Boscobel, he’d found an old hall in the grounds of the Boscobel house. He’d been cheated and fooled and it had resulted in the deaths of the people whom he held most dear. Boscobel had blown up the hall and almost everyone inside had perished.

Even now, thirty years later, he couldn’t think about that night without grief pouring through him in uncontrollable waves, together with fury.

He would not have that happen again, not while he was alive to prevent it. Even now, when he was working to rebuild what they had once taken for granted, the grief would sometimes hit him in the middle of the day, when he was doing something else, and a little moment, even something as small as a gesture, reminded him of his friends and family. One of the dead had been his father, the man who had sired the body he now occupied.

That worked. Now his desire for the woman subsided, and his mind cleared. If he had to remind himself of that day every time he was in her presence, he would, even if it killed him.

A small sacrifice compared to what he had already lost.